Magic shoved his back-pack and carry-on onto the back seat of my idling Corolla, slammed the door shut, and jumped in beside me in the front—one fell swoop.

“Good to see you,” I said, and turned to face the stream of traffic passing on my side of the car. I’d stole only a quick look at Magic when he hopped in next to me. Jet-lagged face. No smile. A bit dejected maybe after having left his ancestorial homeland. But clean shaven now, and without the long hair and samurai-bun that he had when I dropped him at the airport ten days before. I was focused on the traffic out, watching to my left for an opportunity to slip into the steady parade of cars on the roadway leaving the airport terminal. I listened for Magic to start scrolling through his adventure in Korea. Nothing. I spoke watching the car-stream from my sideview mirror now.

“Tired? Tired and hungry?” I said, ready to barge into any little opening between cars in the stream of traffic.

“Tired,” Magic said. “Not hungry.”

But nothing about his trip to Korea to find his biological parents. Just queries for me about the ten days of weather in Minnesota, about my wife, about local news, about the mayoral election. I wanted him to open up about Korea. I prodded him gingerly, avoiding meddling questions. Don’t pry, I thought. Just elicit his story—Good time there I bet. Interesting place to visit? Wow, what an experience. It was not easy for me to eschew questions related to his heritage.

“You were in Korea for ten days, right?”

“Yeah, it was OK.”

“OK?”

“Yeah. Plenty of good food. Lots of noodles and kimchi. Kimchi everywhere. You can smell it in the air. Yeah, they like kimchi. That’s not some gastronomical myth.”

Then Magic related his funny experiences in Seoul. On an elevator. At a deli. Cultural faux pas. We laughed. The Magic I knew. Always ready to laugh. And he revealed a new and correct pronunciation of his Korean name, Man-Sik. It would no longer be Magic, he said, a moniker he got in elementary school. His Korean name was a popular one, he learned. That made him feel proud. “The pronunciation will still get massacred here, however,” he said and shrugged his shoulders.

I revved the Corolla. A quick swerve. A cut into a two-car opening and I was in the line of cars away from the airport. The driver behind me let me have it with her horn. The elderly lady at the wheel gave me the finger. Sorry, I said under my breath. She was irked. The line continued moving slow. I turned to Magic again.

“I bet you found a lot of cousins,” I said. “Made some good friends and contacts.”

Magic took some time to reply. “Uhm, . . . pretty successful, yeah. I couldn’t . . . ahhh . . . communication was not easy sometimes. Much of the time.”

“But you had . . .”

“Yeah, I had interpreters. Not all the time. What they called interpreters. But I had to wonder sometimes if I was hearing them correctly. Were they using the wrong English words when they could not find the right ones? Just to not lose face?”

“Oh,” I said.

“I think my questions were not always translated correctly at adoption services. Some of them not answered at all. Maybe indelicate questions for them. Maybe I used words they were not familiar with. Maybe I wasn’t catching all they said. I was jet lagged, so I definitely wasn’t so sharp. But my mother’s niece spoke English pretty good. She was a big help with my mother.”

We stopped for a traffic light, and I turned to him again and studied his face. Magic was Korean if he told you he was Korean. But I don’t think he had the regular—the more common Korean face. Not the distinctive look of Koreans that might distinguish him from Chinese or Japanese. Not the high cheekbones of many Koreans—compared to other Asians, that is. I wondered if being raised solely in America had anything to do with his face. Just a whimsical thought. As an anthropologist I allowed myself that.

I was impatient to get more substantive without being intrusive. I sought unawkward ways to ask. Do you feel . . . I mean . . . any different now? That was not right. I mean, do you feel your perceptions of Korea or Koreans have been uhmmm . . . modified . . . by your visit? Still not right. I tried an indirect approach.

“Bet the trip was worth it. And you found your mother!”

“Oh, yeah. It was worthwhile. It was worthwhile. I found my mother and a good cousin. I got information I wanted. And some I didn’t want,” Magic added.

Magic’s story was one I’d heard from other Korean adoptees who’d made the trip to find their origins and settle struggles over identity. The lucky ones were successful. Most were not. I’d heard many of these stories in my job at the university cultural affairs office. And I brought them up in my anthropology class lectures.

Magic’s experience was one of the good ones. His mother was open to meeting him and she greeted him warmly. No problem there. His cousin had met him at the door to a public housing unit and counseled him on what to expect from his mother. Still he was taken aback by his mother’s reception. She’d dropped to her knees when Magic’s cousin led him into the flat. In that position his mother bowed deeply with her forehead almost on the floor. “My deepest apologies.” she said when she looked up at Magic. He was beside himself. His mother apologized a lot. No hugging but much bowing and apologizing. She gave him gifts and apologized. Fed him and apologized. Showed him his baby picture and apologized.

The apartment was a nice, clean place, Magic said. Small but sufficient for his mother and his cousin, who lived with her aunt. “I didn’t understand why my cousin was staying with her,” Magic said. “I asked on two occasions. I didn’t understand the replies. I also asked my cousin about my father, and she translated for my mother about that, and they talked at some length, until my cousin turned away from my mother and told me my mother wasn’t sure. I left it at that.

“My mother wanted me to stay overnight,” Magic said. “And that was great, I thought. But that required my cousin to give up her cot for my mother, so my cousin had to sleep someplace else. Mother made up the cot for herself and made up her bed for me and apologized. I spent the night there without my cousin’s language help, and I was again the mute baby my mother had given up.

“I didn’t find out why she’d put me up for adoption,” Magic said, “but I’m guessing it was poverty. She’d worked for a greenhouse or a nursery before retiring, as I understood it. Indeed there were a lot of potted plants around the apartment. Big ones with enormous variegated leaves.”

The next day Magic and several other Korean adoptees met at the National Center for the Rights of the Child for a search for family records. “That’s where I learned about my father,” Magic told me.

“Oh, I hope you could meet him,” I said.

Magic took moments for himself before he replied. “He’s Japanese,” he finally said. “No longer in Korea,” he said, looking away from me and out his side window.

That took me by surprise. I thought about the significance of that. I’m sure it complicated Magic’s feelings about his identity on a trip designed to help him reconcile feelings about his Korean heritage. That thought distracted me momentarily, took my mind to a different place, and almost made me miss my turn. I maneuvered sharply and swung the car into the sun. Horn honking came from somewhere. Magic put his hand on the dashboard to brace himself. Then he removed clip-on shades from his breast pocket, adjusted them on his glasses, and pulled down the car’s sun visor. He had no more about his father. Like he hadn’t meant to tell me as much as he had said.

“A Japanese father. That’s interesting,” I said. “You . . .. Well, . . . another line to pursue, right? You must be proud.”

Magic had nothing. Like he was telling me I should ignore the Japanese part of him. He pushed a radio button. He needed to get away from that thought. The station for classical music and Schubert’s Eighth Symphony. Great music, but not for Magic’s state of mind. He turned the radio off and started up about his tour of Seoul and sights with a group of Korean adoptees. A Korean Adoption Services tour. The city was a large metropolis and too big to get a real feel for on a short visit, he said. The view from his hotel window was only tall buildings. Getting to know Korea was important for adoptees, and visits included the National Museum of Korea, a morning market, a prominent palace—one of five in Seoul, and a botanical garden. “No visit to the DMZ,” Magic added. “And we had great food at two restaurants. Nothing like the frozen Korean food from the Asian market here. And I met some adoptees from Canada and Europe. That tour was good,” he said.

Magic also told me about parting with his mother. “My cousin was with me in the flat and I stood in front of Mother. I wanted to grab and hug her but I knew that was indecorous. I stood there for so long. I finally put my two hands on my mother’s shoulders. That was close enough to a hug. My mother bowed and wept. I leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.”

“Think you’ll see your mother again?”

“I’d like to bring her here, of course. For a visit. Or bring my adoptive parents to meet my real mother and understand a part of me they have never known.”

We were approaching Magic’s parents’ place now. “My parents’ll want to know every detail,” he said with a smile. I knew his adoptive parents were strong and did not discourage him from searching for his biological parents, but they had to feel some sort of epilogue, I thought. He loved his adoptive parents. I knew that. They had an adopted daughter from Central America as well. Magic’s parents understood that all children should discover their own directions, even if it was a rejection of what their parents had expected. Not all parents allowed themselves to understand that. In that way Magic knew he was lucky. I pulled the Corolla over to the curb in front of his parents’ place.

Magic turned to me. “Now I’m not sure what I’ll tell my parents,” he said. “Am I Korean or Japanese? Half  Korean?” He lowered his head and shook it slightly. Out of the car a smile broke out on Magic’s face. The shaggy family sheepdog, its tail wagging furiously, ran up to the car to greet him. The big dog put his forelegs up on Magic’s chest and he hugged the pet.

•    •    •

About a week later, a voicemail message from Magic—Man-Sik. Brief, and a bit curt. Irked about something, maybe. “Let’s we meet,” he said. “The student union coffee shop is good.” His tone was not like him.

I met Man-Sik at the day and time and place he appointed. We stood in line for coffees. He didn’t open any conversations, only yes or no to my chatty questions. I paid for two dark coffees and bought two pastries. I handed him one of the paper cups with stiff sleeves and piping hot coffee at the brim. Man-Sik headed delicately to an empty table in a dimly lighted spot in the place. He sat and I tried unsuccessfully to say something witty to make him smile as I pulled out a chair. I set a plate with a pastry in front of him and one on the table at my place. I looked at my chocolate crescent there and thought only that I would not enjoy it as much as usual. It was like a table ornament. Man-Sik took a sip of black coffee and then put the palms of his hands flat on the tabletop. Tips of thumbs touching each other. I became aware that he had not shaved since he returned from Korea. He looked into my face. He blinked a lot. I was uncomfortable.

Man-Sik confronted me with what I had inadvertently let out about him to a foreign math lecturer on sabbatical at my university for a semester. The anthropology offices are across from the math department, and you meet mathematicians in that arrangement. When I learned the visitor was Korean, I’d let it slip about my undergraduate Korean adoptee friend who’d been to Korea recently. My friend had good things to say about Seoul, I told the math lecturer, and further that my Korean friend learned over there that his biological father was Japanese. It was a very casual encounter. Totally unwitting chat from me, after which I regretted the part I’d said about Man-Sik’s biological father. And from that brush with the visiting math professor, Man-Sik’s story about his Japanese father had somehow circulated quickly among local Korean adoptees, who logically inferred the adoptee had to be Man-Sik.

The Man-Sik that faced me across the table was distraught, separated from himself and who he was, maybe, and certainly separated from what he had always been to me. The realization that his father was Japanese was undermining him. The rapport I’d always enjoyed with him had been replaced by exasperation. I had alienated myself from Man-Sik and from years of a special kinship with him and his family because of my unbecoming disclosure of his paternity. I suspected my former relationship with him was irretrievable.

I was ashamed of myself. I knew I had let out what he’d told me in confidence. I was guilty on that score. I am an anthropologist. It was unprofessional. Man-Sik had confided in me. He’d trusted me and I’d let him down. Maybe I hadn’t quite fully understood his need to keep private what he learned about his biological father.

My wife and I had known Man-Sik’s adoptive parents for a long time, and we watched them raise Man-Sik and saw them do it well. Their sensitive interest in Man-Sik’s Korean ethnicity, and his absorption in it, stood out to us. His parents had even enrolled him in a course in basic conversational Hanguk-uh, though what he learned to say in Korean—How do you do? I am American—was of little help in country. Yet Man-Sik repeated the lines over and over and insisted his teacher make his pronunciation perfect. His enthusiasm for Korean culture included a map of the peninsula on his bedroom wall since middle school and an appreciation of K-pop music and singer fandoms. My wife and I were fond of Man-Sik. We knew about his interest in Korea and things Korean, so we were not surprised when we learned of his desire to find his biological parents.

Man-Sik shared his experience in Korea with his parents here and Korean adoptee friends. He told them about his successful search for his biological mother and the discovery of a cousin, but he had not revealed his Japanese paternity. That was a challenge for him. All his life he’d consider himself Korean. It was who he was. Would the adoptive-Korean community question his Korean heritage now? How should he identify now? He had not wanted his dual ethnicity let out.

“Korean adoptees don’t fit in completely here or in Korea. All we have is ourselves,” he insisted. “Now other adoptees will wonder. Am I going to be Korean or Japanese? Or both? That was never a question for me until now.” Man-Sik sipped a bit at his coffee when he finished what he wanted to say.

I was at a loss for words. I knew I shouldn’t make an excuse for my bobble with the Korean math lecturer. Or rationalize what I had done. I apologized. I told him how sorry I felt. And I felt inadequate telling him that. But be who you are, I thought. Why did it matter if I told someone you were half Japanese. Yeah, I get it, but . . .. I held back on that. It was none of my business. Now I wanted to know what he was going to do about his Japanese family connections.

Man-Sik didn’t touch his pastry. He sipped at his coffee once more, put the cup down, rose and stood for a moment behind his chair, then pushed it into the table. “Thanks for the coffee, Richard,” he said and walked. He’d never used my first name before. I’d always been Professor Rick to him and his family. I was stunned. I couldn’t watch him walk away. The boy I thought I would have been proud to have as a son.

A barista approached my table. “Can I take your plate and fork?”

I nodded. She picked up the items and wiped my area of the table with a damp cloth, removing pastry crumbs.

“How about your friend? Is your friend going to return?” she asked.

I didn’t want to say no. “Just leave it,” I said, and the barista left and I sat alone for a long spell.

– Edward Voeller